1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to control of data processing or information systems, and in particular to control of such systems based in part upon the detected apparent affective or emotional state of a user.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the history of human interaction with information systems, system reaction to the user actively engaged with the system generally has been based upon programmatic response to a user's intentional communicative acts, such as keyboard entry, mouse manipulation, voice input and the like. While certain information systems and applications respond to forms of information from a user that are not intentional communicative acts by the user, such as autonomic conditions in medical monitoring systems or biometric parameters for user identification in security systems, these system responses are generally not within the context of active engagement of the user with the system.
Yet for humans actively engaged with each other, an individual's response to another involves considerably more than reacting to the mere intentional communicative acts of the parties. In particular, effective interaction with others requires perceiving and reacting to the apparent affective or emotional states of others as well as to their intentional communicative acts.
An information system capable of determining a user's apparent affective state would be capable of altering its behavior in response to that apparent state, resulting in more effective interaction with the user. For example, in applications such as email, when a user is in communication with other users, a user's rash emotional reaction in communication may result in the user's transmitting an undesirable message. The system in this example, then, having determined that the user's apparent emotional state is such that the user's communication may be a rash response, may prompt the user for confirmation prior to transmission. What is needed for more effective human interaction with information systems is for information systems to determine and react appropriately to the apparent affective or emotional state of humans with whom they are actively engaged.
In addition to human-computer interaction, humans also use information systems as intermediaries in communication with other humans, as in email and word processing applications. Because effective interaction with other humans requires conveying affective or emotional states, a number of means of conveying such states have been developed by convention for written communications. For example, a correspondent's typing in all capital letters may serve to convey to the recipient the same emotional state that yelling conveys in spoken communications. Additionally or in the alternative, special combinations of common characters may be typed by a correspondent to convey an emotional state to a recipient, such as the now familiar colon-right parenthesis combination :) used to convey happiness or humor. Acronyms typed by a correspondent and understood in common with the recipient can serve the same function, for example “LOL” (laughing out loud) and “ROTF” (rolling on the floor). Depending upon display capabilities of the information systems of correspondent and recipient, the correspondent may convey emotional or affective state to the recipient by typing keystrokes or using function keys to insert special characters (such as a smiley face ), to change a font to bold or italic or to underline for emphasis, or to color font in appropriate portions of text. To convey affective or emotional state in any of these and like conventions used in written communications, the correspondent must intentionally direct an input device, such as a keyboard or a mouse, to insert characters or mark text to convey the correspondent's emotional state. What is needed is for the correspondent's information system, without any intentional direction from the correspondent, to determine the apparent affective or emotional state of the correspondent and react by marking appropriate text in such a way that by convention conveys the emotional state of the correspondent to the recipient.